On HTML5

I, for one, don’t really understand some of the changes coming with the release of HTML5. After reading the entirety of the HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 document, two things occured to me.

I’m a nerd.

Parts of the HTML5 spec seem contradictory to the idea separating presentation from content.

Now, before I go any further, allow me to state clearly that the brains at the W3C that created this language and its documentation are far superior to mine. FAR. But, if one of the changes between HTML 4 and 5 is the removal of presentational markup such as <font> and <center> in favor of handling those effects with CSS, why is there also the addition of tags such as <header>, <nav>, <section>, and <footer>?

To me, if these specific tags don’t offer any inherent differences in behavior, it seems that their effect—as far as layout is concerned—can be accomplished by <div> tags. I suppose this is somewhat related to XML-esque custom tags. I guess it’s just another thing to add to the list of “I don’t get it.”

Regardless, I’m excited at the prospect of new technology. Coupled with the coming release of CSS3, the web is going to take a huge step into the future soon. Think we’ll start hearing about “web 3.0?”